How our $30 million partnership with Yoyo Wallet makes self-sovereign identity relevant
Over the past year, we’ve talked plenty about the globaliD framework and how it’s a welcome upgrade to the existing status quo when it comes to security, privacy, portability, and general user empowerment. In a sense, having a digital identity designed from the ground up in the spirit of the Internet will have a profound social and economic impact on our interconnected, globalized reality.
And having just returned from Money2020 — we’ll have a recap published next week — we received an incredible amount of validation from our approach. A year ago, it felt like the conversation was just getting started. Fast forward to Vegas last week, we heard many of the terms we defined in our white paper such as “attestations” being exchanged by businesses, panelists, and other startups at the biggest US fintech conference of the year.
We’ll be talking plenty more about our vision in the coming months as be get closer to the re-launch of the globaliD app — in particular, some unique aspects of our model that will truly reflect what it means to build an identity layer for the Internet. But envisioning a new way to do things is only half the challenge.
The other half is making a self-sovereign identity practical and useful for end users. How to make a portable, digital identity relevant for the people that matter most. That’s why we’re so thrilled about the $30 million partnership deal between Hard Yaka and Yoyo Wallet, Europe’s fastest growing payments and loyalty app.
Yoyo Wallet is essentially the UK’s version of Wechat Pay.
Having the benefit of joining the party late, the Chinese market leapfrogged card networks straight to digital payments. Last year, mobile payments volume in China hit a staggering $12.8 trillion. Compare that to the US market, where Forrester expects mobile payments volume to triple to $282.9 billion by 2021.
Western markets continue to lag, but the trend is clear. And this latest deal with Yoyo Wallet puts globaliD’s digital identity framework at the forefront of this massive transition happening in global payments.
In the longer term, this will have a transformative effect on how businesses and retailers interact with their customers. Just as the World Wide Web gave companies a means of directly interacting with their users, a portable identity will allow companies to create a direct economic relationship with their patrons.
Today, Yoyo Wallet pays their participating merchants from their bank account to theirs. In the future, these transactions will occur directly from the customer ledger to the merchant ledger, bypassing existing bank and payment rails, eliminating the middlemen and consequently, the fees. This setup also presents the opportunity for merchants to reward customers in new and innovative ways.
Yoyo Wallet Chairman Alain Falys told Forbes:
“Digital identity, enriched with consumer purchasing data and loyalty preferences, has been the cornerstone of the Yoyo proposition to consumers and retailers. It is only natural that we would team up with Greg Kidd and his Hard Yaka team to embed his vision of a global ID useable across all channels into Yoyo’s proven, highly secure and scalable technology platform.”
“Our deep partnership will generate a boost to the globaliD movement that will shape the future of the global consumer market and will also disrupt the status quo in payment by giving more choices to consumers and retailers.”
Yoyo Wallet also published a video interview with their CEO Michael Rolph on their vision and the need for a consistency of identity:
You can check out the full Forbes report here, and stay tuned for more exciting updates from globaliD in the coming months.
